India Aims To Take The "World's Fastest Supercomputer" Crown By 2017
The Department of Energy's Sequoia Supercomputer
NNSA
A plan submitted to the government asks for a nearly $900 million
investment that would produce an exaflop-rated machine 61 times faster
than the world's current fastest supercomputer.
The proposal, which calls for an
investment of more than $870 million over five years, claims that it can
rocket India to the very peak of the TOP500 list, the twice-a-year
tallying of the fastest computing platforms in the world.
That machine is currently Sequoia, an IBM-built supercomputer. It has demonstrated 16.32-petaflop speeds. A petaflop
represents a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. The
next step up is an
exaflop-capable machine that can execute one quintillion operations per
second. One exaflop is equivalent to a thousand petaflops.
Jumping to the exaflop scale in just five years would truly be a leap
forward for India. It’s current highest-ranking machine on the global
TOP500 is in the 58th position, but when it comes to computing India has
historically proven scrappy and ready to innovate on its own.
The
Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the agency behind
the proposal, was established in the late 1980s after it was stonewalled
by the West in its attempt to purchase advanced supercomputing systems.
While India’s homegrown supercomputing industry hasn’t dominated the
field the way the U.S., China, Japan, and Europe have, it has certainly
kept India in the running even without the technology transfers it
sometimes desired.
If adopted, the plan could set a course for India to
climb further up the TOP500 rankings. And if
anyone has the chops to plow ahead in this field with or without help
from abroad, it’s India.
-Akarshi Taneja
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